Startups and the Singularity: Which Boston Innovators Are Believers?

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“I’m sure tech will be brought into [the] body, and that soon,” says Christopher Ahlberg from the Web analysis and prediction firm Recorded Future. “Singularity though… Nah.”

In case you’re wondering, there isn’t really a big point here. But as it turns out, the more interesting responses tend to come from the skeptics. Maybe that’s just because if you agree with Kurzweil and Vinge, or are open to their arguments, there isn’t as much to say.

“I don’t think it will ever come,” says Jason Jacobs of mobile-health startup FitnessKeeper. “Machines will get smarter and smarter, but unlike humans, they will never have a soul. We do need to be careful though, because as they get smarter, they are an increasingly powerful force. This force can be incredibly beneficial if used for good, but also destructive if it gets into the wrong hands.”

Jacobs brings up a much-ballyhooed point: that the singularity, if it ever occurs, could bring about massive destruction and the end of civilization. But there are those who disagree with that outcome (and would probably side more with Kurzweil’s utopian view), even as they cast doubt on its fundamental premise. “I don’t believe in the concept of a singularity as [Vinge] predicts,” says Mike Tuchen of security software firm Rapid7. “I agree we’re seeing an incredible pace of technological progress but don’t see that as inevitably causing a cataclysm.”

Anytime you talk about tech predictions, of course, you have to remember how bad humans are at imagining all the things that could change in the future. Could many of us even see beyond the event horizon of the iPhone in 2007? By that token, some entrepreneurs are hedging their bets. “We tend to limit our view to existing constraints, and when structural changes take place our constraints totally change. So I would say, nothing in this field is really impossible,” says Iker Marcaide from peerTransfer, a financial ed-tech startup.

And, speaking of ed-tech, what about those Boundless guys who started all of this? What do they think of the Singularity? On a recent afternoon, chief exec Ariel Diaz sat in a conference room spinning his intellectual web. “I’m a huge believer in it,” he said. “It’s up to the user to figure out if it’s constructive or destructive. But if it can happen, it will happen. Within my lifetime.” But, he adds, “I think it will sneak up on us in terms of what it looks like.”

I think the question of “believe or not” itself does not reflect what is really important about the singularity, unless you see it just as a meme of popular culture. Those who introduced this concept and who do any meaningful research into it do not see it as a religion-like belief in, say, mind uploading. They say like, trends in IT and other tech tell us that with a high probability in not so distant future we can get to a point when we will know much more about our mind, and may get some positive result from that science, either in a form of uploading or something else. The whole singularity community is not so unanimous about uploading, cryonics, time scale, existential risks or any other future issue, as it may seem. The Singularity is not a religion, it is the space for debates. For me as a Singularitatian, the only stupid thing one can do about the S-thing is not to be skeptical on whether A, B, C… will happen; it is to pretend that nothing of these will ever happen just because it is so “radical” or “strange” or “uncomfortable to think” etc. So in fact it is not believers vs. unbelievers, but thinkers vs, cognitophobes.

The concept of the singularity is a wonderful heuristic for
all of us who are, at heart, techno-enthusiasts. As technologists, inventors, and producers of
value for our society we get up every day believing that something we do will
ratchet forward some positive aspect of humanity. Whether we’re medical device makers or inventors
of digital marketing technologies, we recognize ‘pain points’ that others
encounter and believe we can ‘fix’ them and receive value in exchange for our
efforts. We often do this even if the
value to us individuals is as simple as the feelings we get when we just solve
a problem and experience achievement.
Why shouldn’t we be enticed by the entreaties of the ‘singularity’? Even if it just spurs our imagination onward
and we conceive of more inventions.

Will a real singularity occur in our lifetimes, or in the lifetimes
of our next generations? Personally, I
don’t think so. It seems to me that
scientific and technical frontiers just keep advancing as we develop our
capacities to measure, observe, predict and make things. Just when you are about to acknowledge that
the singularity appears, some speck of disconfirmation is likely to appear on
the horizon. Singularity always seems to
imply omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. I really haven’t been able to measure those
things to date. Have you?

After all, how can we anticipate the singularity when we’ve
really only begun the extension of sensing and data collection across satellites
and planets recently with space telescopes, robotic probes, etc.? Sure, machines keep getting smarter,
self-repairing, and perhaps have potential for affective and moral
computing. Maybe computational cognition
and related disciplines will even shed light on philosophical and epistemological questions like, “Is
the soul real or just an epiphenomenon?”
These are fun things for speculation and party conversations in places
like Kendall Square, Harvard Square, and even Berkeley.

From my point of view, regardless of ‘belief’ in the
possible occurrence of singularity, conversations like this expose the optimists,
pessimists and pragmatists within our communities or science and
technology. These debates demonstrate
the current non-singular uniqueness that abides in all of us who work very hard
to come up with something of value, some solution, to help other people live,
work or play in a better way; and I like that, singular or not.

Eliya

The word singularity is the awesome for all of us.
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